Staggering Picasso trove turns up in France

By JAMEY KEATEN, Associated Press – Mon Nov 29, 6:20 pm ET

PARIS – Pablo Picasso almost never stopped creating, leaving thousands of drawings, paintings and sculptures that lure crowds to museums and mansions worldwide. Now, a retired electrician says that 271 of the master’s creations have been sitting for decades in his garage.

Picasso’s heirs are claiming theft, the art world is savoring what appears to be an authentic find, and the workman, who installed burglar alarms for Picasso, is defending what he calls a gift from the most renowned artist of the 20th century.

Picasso’s son and other heirs say they were approached by electrician Pierre Le Guennec in September to authenticate the undocumented art from Picasso’s signature Cubist period.

Instead, they filed a suit for illegal possession of the works — all but alleging theft by a man not known to be among the artist’s friends. Police raided the electrician’s French Riviera home last month, questioned him and his wife and confiscated the disputed artworks.

Fruitful Talent Who Made Art World Multiply

Robert Rauschenberg, the subject of a chock-a-block time capsule of a show at Gagosian Gallery in Chelsea, was an optimist and a doer. He not only did what artists normally do: make paintings, sculptures, prints and photographs. He also did the work of performers, musicians, philanthropists and career politicians.

He danced, composed, gave away money and initiated diplomatic missions, always on behalf of art. He believed that if he, or we, or anyone could just produce enough art, then art and life would be the same thing, and the world would change for the better. So, committed universal citizen that he was, he kept trying to make enough.

He made a lot. He was blessed with sunny energy, immense talent and an unstoppable creative flow, the equivalent of stream of consciousness in literature. For years on end, that stream rushed forward, turning whatever it swept up — childhood memories, art history, street junk, nature, the daily news — into gold. Then for stretches, and quite lengthy ones, it meandered and pooled. Even then, the flow never stopped. In a six-decade career, Rauschenberg turned out more than 6,000 works of art, some of preposterous size and ambition.

Frey’s 2003 memoir, A Million Little Pieces, sold 8m copies but landed him in trouble after bits of it were found to have been invented. Photograph: Antonio Olmos

James Frey, the bad boy of American letters who was given a very public dressing-down by Oprah Winfrey over his first book – in which he passed off fiction as memoir – is back in the headlines over his latest venture, a collective writing project that some have accused of being brutal and Dickensian.

Wherever Frey goes, controversy is never far behind. Back in 2003, A Million Little Pieces, sold 8m copies but landed him in trouble after bits of it were found to have been invented.

Up to now, he has never seemed that fazed by the opprobrium heaped upon him. As an author in a crowded US literary market, there is, after all, no such thing as bad publicity.

But judging by his reaction, the reception of his new project, Full Fathom Five, has got under his skin this time.

Frey genuinely sounds peeved at the attack he has come under for what detractors say is exploiting young, unknown writers. “People like to make me out to be a villain. I don’t love that. I really have no interest in being cast as a bad boy in this case.”

The idea for Full Fathom Five emerged, he says, from his passion for the Harry Potter series. “I loved the Potter books, I read every one the day they came out. I think books are important and I wanted to help keep young people reading them like I did as a kid.”

Frey saw collective writing as a way to get around the conundrum of having umpteen ideas for clever commercial book series but never enough time to write them. He also liked the idea of applying the model of an art studio along the lines of those run by Damien Hirst and Jeff Koons to the book world.

So he came up with the concept of a book-writing factory that would go beyond the basic model of existing companies such as Alloy, which use teams of writers to produce books to order.

Ideas for books, or ideally series of books, would either come from him or an author recruited to the Full Fathom Five stable. Then Frey would hold the writer’s hand, providing critical feedback as they wrote.

The finished product would be sold to publishers and/or film studios, and the writer would be given a share in the royalties as incentive to produce their best work.

He started to appeal through colleges and writing courses for budding young writers prepared to write for little upfront, in the hope of fame and riches down the line.

Frey now has 30 in his stable and has sold 12 books of three separate series. The first series, Lorien Legacies, which is hung around the conceit of a teenager alien landing in Ohio, has already been launched in the US and in the UK by Michael Joseph/Puffin and is being made into a film by DreamWorks.

The others are The Montauk Project, which centres on a 16-year-old girl who stumbles into a time machine in an old military base that really exists at the end of Long Island, and The Other World Chronicles, a modern retelling of the Arthurian legend which has been optioned by Will Smith’s film company.

The good news for Frey is that with such deals already in the bag, Full Fathom Five is off to a flying start. The bad news is the drumbeat of criticism that is building.

It began with one of the lead authors of the first volume of the Lorien Legacies, I Am Number Four, calling in lawyers to represent him in his dealings with Frey. Writer Jobie Hughes complained that he has not been credited for the book, which appeared under a pseudonym. Then New York magazine published an article by a young woman who had been in negotiations with Frey to join his factory but had been dropped by him. The magazine also revealed what it described as the “brutal” terms of the contracts offered to writers.

The contentious elements include: an upfront payment of just $250 (£156) to the writer for an entire book, which is pitiful unless the book is sold, at which point they get 30%-40% of any royalties obtained; the fact that Frey retains all final creative control and the copyright of the work in his company, with total power to decide what happens to the book; and a system of fines if the writer breaks the terms of the contract. A publishing lawyer told New York magazine that he had never seen a contract like it in his 16 years of negotiations.

Frey insists the portrait of him as a ruthless exploiter of youthful talent is wrong on several counts. First, his contracts vary according to the degree of experience of the writer and according to whether the idea for the book came from him or them.

He estimates that the central storyline of about 85% of the books under way originated with him.

Second, the contract is no more nor less “brutal” than standard contracts you would find in the law or film world. “I’m running a business in a highly litigious society. The contract is simply designed to protect Full Fathom Five and our partners like DreamWorks.”

As for the credit issue, he says many of the books he will commission will have the authors’ real names fully credited. But some will not, as fits the story in question.

I Am Number Four was written in the voice of a 16-year-old alien called Pittacus Lore, and so had that name attached to it to enhance the literary device, as was fully agreed by Hughes, Frey says. Similarly, the character of the 16-year-old girl at the heart of The Montauk Project is credited as the author as a fictional trick.

What seems to have irritated Frey most intensely is the depiction of him as money-grabbing exploiter-in-chief. That is not his motivation at all, he says: “I know I’m the bad boy of American literature, but that’s not what this is about. I’m doing this because I love books.”

For someone with a reputation as controversial as his, Frey runs the risk of sounding as though he protests too much. Watch this space: this particular controversy has the potential to run and run.

ROASTING RICHARD PRINCE
The roast of artist Richard Prince at the Friars Club on East 55th Street in Manhattan on Nov. 17, 2010, turned out well, by all accounts. RoastmasterGlenn O’Brien gave a masterful speech, toasting the guest of honor with witty one-liners — some borrowed from Prince’s own paintings — and a comic reading of the actual jokes contained in Sigmund Freud’s Wit and Its Relation to the Unconscious. “Many of us consider Uncle Miltie to be the originator of appropriation,” O’Brien noted. “He was really an archivist, he assembled the Milton Berle Private Joke File, which contains over 10,000 jokes, only a small percentage of which have been appropriated by Richard Prince, the Milton Berle of art.”

Accompanying O’Brien on the piano was jazzman Robert Aaron. Second on the dais was Stuart Parr, Eminem’s producer, who read what purported to be congratulatory telegrams from Larry Gagosian, Peter Brant, Silvio Berlusconi, Arnold Scwharzenegger and other notables, hilarious impersonations that were all done in the proper accents.

Destroyed Apple Products

This makes me wince a little because of my love of apple products but the results look very cool, a series of smashed, mangled, shot up and melted apple products are the subject of a recent photography project by a san francisco graphic designer who said he’s trying to make people think about their relationship with these universally beloved gadgets.

Michael Tompert said he had spent the last several months purchasing the newest in apple consumer technology and then creatively destroying the pricey toys. the results, which he photographed, briefly went on display at a gallery exhibition that ran over the weekend at the small gallery in San Francisco. Tompert said the idea for the project came to him after he gave each of his two sons an ipod touch for christmas. He said the two boys fought over one of the devices, which had a certain game on it. fed up with the quarrel, Tompert said he grabbed one of the ipods and smashed it on the ground. ‘they were kind of stunned – the screen was broken and this liquid poured out of it. I got my camera to shoot it,my wife told me that i should do something with it.’

His methods of destruction varied by gadget. to destroy an iphone 3g device, he used a heckler & koch handgun to blow a hole through it. to obliterate a set of ipod nanos, he placed the devices on a train track so that a locomotive would run over them.

A REPORT: PEN USA / JAMES SALTER / PLAYBOY

I was in a thrift store buying some clothes last week and under the counter I saw a stack of old Playboy magazines. Although it’s hardly possible to be an adult in America and not have at least a passing acquaintance with hardcore pornography, I realized I couldn’t remember ever having looked inside an actual copy of Playboy. So for $5 I bought the copy on top of the stack, the June 1973 issue featuring Marilyn Cole, playmate of the year, with fiction by Joyce Carol Oates, Robert McNear, and George MacDonald Fraser (yes, the issue contains three short stories).

where is she now?

I haven’t read anything in it yet. I leafed through it and found a relatively tame pictorial, all golden light and modest pubic hair. Also some tone-deaf comics (post-coital woman: “I guess this means I’m not very convincing when I say no”) and lame, topical ad slogans (“the men’s lib watch”). I may never open it again. But I like having it, a quaint yet iconic artifact with a warm, self-satisfied aura.

A few days ago, a friend asked if I wanted to go to the PEN USA awards. Knowing absolutely nothing about the year’s nominees or awards, I said I’d love to. It was last night. I got in a car accident on the way (not at fault), but everything was fine, no harm no foul. The first person I recognized at the awards was James Salter, who I love. I’d recently reread his extraordinary Paris Review interview. (“Salter at one point estimated that he has had eighty-seven hundred martinis in his life.”) A collection of his letters with Robert Phelps, Memorable Days, came out this summer and is lovely. Dusk, his first short story collection, was also just re-released by Modern Library. He said he and his wife Kay had flown out just for this event, at which point I realized that he was one of the evening’s two main honorees. The other was Hugh Hefner.

Hefner was to get an Award of Honor and a First Amendment Award. Old issues of Playboy were being auctioned off. Some for a lot of money. I wondered if mine was worth a lot of money. (It isn’t.) Hefner was a gravitational presence in the room. Everybody who spoke mentioned him. All these men seemed giddy that they were in a room with “Hef” (who wore a black suit with a red shirt and was accompanied everywhere by his two blonde girlfriends and his bodyguards). None of the women did, except one smart and lovely woman who said, “Hef is here… oh God, how do I get his attention? I just want to be a Playmate,” as if she were joking, except secretly I think she wasn’t joking. I went to the bathroom and was at the urinal and Hefner came in, bringing to three the number of famous men I have urinated near (the other two being Martin Amis and James Frey). The bodyguards came in, too. It made me nervous.

Haute Living Los Angeles Update: Steven Spielberg

Posted By Diana Gdula on November 17th, 2010

Our Haute 100 list details the accomplishments of the most influential people in each of our markets—Miami, New York, Los Angeles, and San Francisco. These people continue to make moves, so rather than waiting for the next Haute 100 issue to come out, we thought we’d provide you with regular updates on those Haute 100 members who are making headlines. Check back daily for more info on the most powerful people in your city. Steven Spielberg is helping James Frey turn the page with a DreamWorks film adaptation of “I Am Number Four.”

Steven Spielberg

Category: Billionaires

Industry: Film

Company: DreamWorks

What Made Him Haute: Arguably the world’s most famous filmmaker, Spielberg currently has more than 30 projects underway, including Indiana Jones 5, War Horse, and an untitled Martin Luther King Jr. project.

What Makes Him Haute Now: Although James Frey has amassed much criticism within the media and literary worlds, being denounced by Oprah and shunned by many book circles, it’s not time to close the books on him anytime soon. Steven Spielberg, Stacey Snider and Michael Bay are reading between the lines and turning a sci-fi novel from Frey’s “Full Fathom Five,” his new book series, film and television venture into a DreamWorks film.

Spielberg and Snider read the book and acquired the film rights to “I Am Number Four” soon after. The film, which will be produced by Bay, will star Alex Pettyfer, Dianna Argon and Timothy Olyphant. Opening in theaters in February 2011, this will be DreamWorks Studios’ first release since becoming independent from Paramount Pictures.

As the Wall Street Journal and New York Magazine report, Frey is taking a page from the Harry Potter series, as well as “Twilight” and “Gossip Girl,” with Full Fathom Five, employing M.F.A. students or graduates from schools including Columbia University and Princeton University, magazine editors from coast-to-coast and established novelists to develop fiction books, which he then markets to film studios, television production companies and publishing companies.

With TRON: Legacy set to open on December 17th, people are getting jazzed about light-cycle races. Disney is hoping that excitement carries over to their new futuristic racing thriller, Hovercar 3D. Based on an online serial from Australian author Matthew Reilly, Hovercar 3D was optioned by Disney back in 2004. They’re hoping to slap a franchise tag on the property and fill the void left by the conclusion of the Harry Potter series when it ends next year.

The plot, which centers around a young hover car pilot who must use his racing skills off the track to escort a government informant, is being converted for the big screen by screenwriter Blaise Hemingway (The Bracelet). Al Gough and Miles Millar (I Am Number Four) are also involved, according to Reilly’s website.

6-Stebbins from Stephen King’s Long Walk: King makes you develop an obsession about him at the same pace his character Ray Garraty does. Stebbins is like that kind in elementary school who thinks he does things better than everybody else.

‘Hint Fiction’ Celebrates The (Extremely) Short Story

NPR STAFF

Can you tell a whole story in 25 words or fewer? Inspired by the six-word novel attributed to Ernest Hemingway — “For sale: baby shoes, never worn” — Robert Swartwood has compiled a new anthology of bite-sized fiction.

The stories in Hint Fiction are short enough to be text messages, but the genre isn’t defined only by its length. It’s characterized by the way the form forces readers to fill in the blanks, Swartwood tells NPR’s Scott Simon. Most fiction hints at a larger story, he says, but the brevity of these stories really challenges the reader’s imagination.

The short stories in Hint Fiction were selected from more than 2,000 submissions — Swartwood started small, soliciting stories on his website, but the contest grew in scope when publisher W.W. Norton got involved. The anthology also features the writing of well-known authors, including Joyce Carol Oates, Ha Jin, Peter Straub and James Frey.

Did NY Mag Rush Their James Frey Feature Online Only After Learning OfWSJ Scoop?

Readers of both NYMag.com and the Wall Street Journal’s website may have noticed that in the wee small hours of the morning, both publications posted similar but competing articles about author James Frey and Full Fathom Five, the book-packaging company he launched to churn out young adult fiction. As it turns out, New York’s version was rushed online only after the magazine learned that the WSJ was about to scoop them on a story they’d had in the works for weeks.

The articles’ tones vary drastically. The WSJ’s Katherine Rosman and Lauren A. E. Schuker offer a measured view of Frey’s operation, noting how little Frey pays the young writers he employs (“they get $250 upon signing and another $250 upon completion of a book”) as well as how successful its first major product, a story called I Am Number Four that’s being adapted into a movie by Michael Bay and Steven Spielberg, has been. New York Magazine’s Suzanne Mozes, by contrast, is unabashedly negative in her (much-longer) piece. She accuses Frey of rampant exploitation and implies that the bestselling author is an insufferable, amoral egomaniac (“he’s in it to ‘change the game’ and ‘move the paradigm’; he won’t write anything that doesn’t change the world,” she writes).

As it turns out, Mozes has a personal ax to grind against Frey. In her article, she recalls how she was once in talks to write a book for Full Fathom Five. She implies that Frey ultimately declined to work with her because she requested a more equitable contract: “Twenty-eight minutes after I sent an e-mail requesting amendments to the contract, I received an e-mail from Frey rescinding his offer to collaborate. ‘We loved the idea that we eventually arrived at together,’ he wrote. ‘At this time, though, we don’t think this going to work out.’”

Rosman and Schuker, by contrast, have no connection to Frey outside of their article.

James Frey’s Next Act

His 2003 debut book, “A Million Little Pieces,” was named Amazon Book of the Year and has sold eight million copies in more than 30 languages. When it was revealed that parts of the purported memoir were actually fiction, the press turned on him and Oprah Winfrey filleted him on national television.

For Mr. Frey’s new venture, Full Fathom Five, the author oversees lesser-known writers as they develop fictional ideas into books that he then markets to publishers and film studios. Its first offering, “I Am Number Four,” is a young-adult science-fiction thriller about an alien who comes to Earth as an Ohio teenager. It was published in August and hit the best-seller list. Michael Bay brought the project to DreamWorks Studios, where partners Stacey Snider and Steven Spielberg acquired the film rights after reading the book, with Mr. Bay as producer. Starring Alex Pettyfer, Dianna Agron and Timothy Olyphant, the film will be released in February, DreamWorks’ first offering since it severed ties from Paramount and became independent, with its movies distributed by Disney.

Full Fathom Five is already wrapped in real-life drama. One writer hired attorneys to represent him when dealings with Mr. Frey grew contentious (the dispute was settled late last month). Mr. Frey says that a disgruntled writer is working on a magazine story about him. The writer declined comment. “I go to work and try to do cool things. I can’t control what people write about me,” says Mr. Frey.

Some publishers and producers are happy to look beyond his troubled past. Ms. Snider of DreamWorks is unconcerned. “Unless James is an alien,” she says, “this book is not a memoir.”

Mr. Frey began contemplating the operation that has become Full Fathom Five around the time he finished reading the last installment of the Harry Potter series in 2007. “Someone is going to replace Harry Potter,” he recalls thinking. “Maybe it’ll be me.” A co-owner of an art gallery in New York, Mr. Frey imagined a literary version of an artist’s workshop, where one person with a vision employs others to execute it. “I have too many ideas,” he says.

How Hollywood killed the movie stunt

Computers and editing tricks have obliterated one of cinema’s great pleasures: Seeing real people in real danger

On Nov. 12, 1910, a hundred years ago today, a man jumped out of a burning-hot air balloon into the Hudson River while a movie camera rolled. The vast majority of silent films are lost to history — vanished, destroyed or somehow rendered invisible — and this, it would seem, is one of them; I’ve seen the burning balloon gag cited as the first movie stunt on a number of sites, some quite thorough and authoritative, yet none list the film’s title or the name of the stuntman. Photographic evidence of the balloon man’s deed lives on in the Topps bubblegum card pictured here, and his legacy can be seen on any screen that shows moving images.

But what happens when movies change, and stunts become devalued?

I ask because in looking at that image of the stuntman diving into the Hudson, and running through a mental checklist of my favorite movie stunts, I realized that almost none of them occurred in films released during the last 10 years.

Bloomberg – Warhol Tops New York Art Sales for Second Day With $35 Million Coke Bottle

Andy Warhol’s painting of a Coca- Cola bottle sold for $35.4 million at Sotheby’s yesterday, making the artist the star of New York’s contemporary art auctions for two nights running as the market recovers slowly from a slump.

While eight bidders vied for the 7-foot-tall Warhol, they failed to reproduce the drama at rival Phillips de Pury & Co. a day earlier, when another 1962 Warhol, of actress Elizabeth Taylor, sold for $63 million.

“It was not frothy,” said dealer Harry Blain after the $222.5 million sale, the largest in the category since May 2008. “It was good, solid, considered buying, nothing outlandish.”

Author James Frey, fashion designer Valentino Garavani and Michael Dell’s money manager, Glenn Fuhrman, were at the front of the saleroom as 91 percent of the 54 lots found buyers. Five artist auction records were set, including Julie Mehretu and Larry Rivers, helping the total rise just above the $214.5 million presale high estimate, which does not include commissions.

Red Planet

WHENEVER THE CONTEMPORARY AUCTIONS draw nigh, New York galleries greet the influx of collectors as if it were the Second Coming. Yet, to borrow from Yeats, it wasn’t anarchy that was loosed upon the world last weekend. Instead it was Larry Gagosian, who announced the addition of his tenth gallery, in Geneva, and led the smoothly coiffed slouching beast with a triple-headed monster of shows for Rauschenberg, Currin, and Kiefer.

Yes, it’s true. (Or might be.) For years, fringe types have pointed to amazingly sketchy but entertaining evidence that the attacks of 9/11 were actually foretold by the beloved Fox cartoon. Nearly four years before 9/11, in an episode of the show entitled “The City of New York vs. Homer Simpson,” there’s a curious little scene that some conspiracy lovers and “Simpsons” aficionados have long thought might be a warning….

Silly as that seems, members of an online forum run by crackpot David Icke—best known for his theory that various prominent figures (George W. Bush, Kris Kristofferson) are actually shape-shifting “Reptillians” bent on world domination—seem to have bought into it. Noted one: “Rumors are that the creator of the show is a 33rd degree Freemason. Harry Shearer who does 12 voices on the Simpsons is a member of the Bohemian Grove.” (Not really, but he did make a really bad film satirizing Bohemian Grove, which is close enough.)

Anyway, ever since, a certain subset of true patriots has been parsing “The Simpsons” for hidden messages about the next devastating event. And recently, they found one.

It’s been almost five years since The Smoking Gun called into question the veracity of James Frey’s 2003 “memoir,” A Million Little Pieces, sparking a controversy that came crashing to its climax when Oprah Winfrey berated Frey on her show for misrepresenting his (or his protagonist’s, depending on how much you believe he made up) struggle with overcoming addiction. Some believed it to be a career-ending confrontation; David Carr, writing for The New York Times, described Frey and his publisher, Nan Talese, as having been “snapped in two like dry winter twigs.”

But Frey—who said he originally tried to sell the book as a novel, but was turned down by multiple publishers—carried on, inking a seven-figure deal with HarperCollins in 2007 to write a proper novel, Bright Shiny Morning, and even garnering an apology from Oprah herself. These days, Frey’s diversifying: he’s just finished a new novel, The Final Testament of the Holy Bible, which centers on a contemporary messiah living in New York. He’s working with Mark Wahlberg and Steve Levinson on an HBO pilot about the porn industry. And he currently has a text-based art exhibition up at John McWhinnie—which Charlie Finch, writing for Artnet, saidRichard Prince was “second in the door” to see. We visited Frey at his office to discuss these projects, find out what he really thinks about memoirs, and peruse his iTunes.

NATE FREEMAN: You have a lot of new projects; there’s an exhibition uptown—do you want to explain how that happened?

JAMES FREY: It happened because Lisa Dennis and the chairman of Sotheby’s asked me out, and asked if I’d write an essay for their show, and I said yeah. I’ve written for a lot of artists, and I get asked to write about art a lot, so I said yeah, sure. I wrote the essay for her, and then I wanted to do something else with it. And I’ve always said I’m more influenced in what I do by artists, and how they work, how they think, and the freedom they’re given to work and think, than I really am by other writers.

So I started thinking about what else I could do with the piece, and one of the ideas I had was to start transferring what I write directly onto canvas—you know, there’s a long tradition of artists that use words in their work. The easy contemporary examples are Richard Prince or Ed Ruscha or Christopher Wool, each of whom make text-based art. They usually come at it from the other side, where the visualization of the text is as or more important than what the words actually say, and I just thought I could do the same thing—just make it so that the words are actually more important than how they’re presented.

FREEMAN: You’re still working on the book, right?

FREY: Yeah, I have a book coming out in April. I can’t talk really at this point how we’re going to release it, but it won’t be conventionally released, and the way it will be released and presented actually has much more to do with the art world than it does the publishing world.

FREEMAN: But the book itself is called Illumination?

FREY: No, it was originally called Illumination. It’s called The Final Testament of the Holy Bible.

FREEMAN: And it’s about Jesus Christ coming to New York?

FREY: It’s about a guy who might be Christ, or might be the long-awaited Jewish messiah, who is alive and living in New York City. What that person would be like, what would they believe in, how would they live, how would people react to them.

FREEMAN: Was it a struggle to take all these sacred texts, and all this legend and everything, and work it in with the modern New York City in a way that was fresh and didn’t seem forced? How did you reconcile that?

FREY: I just sat down and wrote the book, man. It was a hard book to write, it took a lot longer than any other book I’ve written, but I sat down and wrote it, just like that.

FREEMAN: How do you feel about it now?

FREY: I mean, I dig it. I’m happy with it, I’m glad it’s done. I’ll let people read it and decide what they think of it. It’s irrelevant what I think of it. Once the books are done and they go into the world, I let them go.

FREEMAN: I see you have your iTunes up—do you listen to music while you write?

FREY: Yeah, I listen to music all day.

FREEMAN: Do you switch it up a lot, or is it a very specific canon of stuff that you listen to?

FREY: No, I listen to a lot of shit, man. You can click through and see what comes up. There’s The Plimsouls, do you know The Plimsouls?

FREEMAN: I think so.

FREY: You are too young to know them, maybe?

FREEMAN: Maybe.

FREY: There we would have Pearl Jam, there we would have Cyndi Lauper, there we would have Toto, there we would have Kelly Clarkson, there we would have The Spin Doctors, Elise Meyer, India.Arie, Bette Midler, The Spinners.

FREEMAN: I know The Spinners. And it’s never distracting, listening to music when you write?

FREY: Either listening to music or watching TV, I need noise of some kind.

FREEMAN: And speaking of TV, you have a new project on HBO, right? About the porn industry in LA.

FREY: Yeah, there it literally is.

FREEMAN: Is that something that you have a special knowledge of?

FREY: No, I have no knowledge of it. I spent a week in LA, and I shadowed the CEO’s of two big porn companies, and I met with a bunch of porn agents and directors and writers and producers and a bunch of porn stars, male and female. I certainly learned a lot. No, whatever I knew about it before that week I only knew as an occasional consumer of it.

FREEMAN: What drew you to that world?

FREY: It was Mark Wahlberg and Steve Levinson’s idea. They called me to ask if I was interested in doing it with them. I just think it’s a great world to tell stories in, to tell cool stories: money, sex, fame, and scandal. Those are great subject matters to work with. I also think it’s cool that porn is this huge business that most people in America consume in some way, though they usually do it in secret, and no one really knows anything about it. Nobody knows how it functions, what its people are like, so it’s something no one’s ever done before. I like doing things people haven’t done before. I mean, we have Boogie Nights, and that was it.

FREEMAN: Is there any precursor in literature that might set the tone for what you’re trying to do?

FREY: A precursor in literature… Tropic of Cancer.

FREEMAN: No one has really “swum in the depths” on TV.

FREY: We are going to swim in the deepest depths. We’ll see—the show is a long ways away. I’m literally writing it right now, and any TV show or film is a long process from the words on a computer to sounds and images on a screen. We’ll see what we get to do.

FREEMAN: And once the book comes out, it will be tours and readings and whatnot?

FREY: Don’t know, I think I’m done with tours and readings.

FREEMAN: Exhausting?

FREY: Yeah, I’m married, I have a couple kids, I’ve traveled a lot, I’ve done book tours a lot, I’m happy to stay home and take my kids to school and come to the office.

FREEMAN: It’s a nice office.

FREY: [LAUGHS] Thanks.

FREEMAN: Are you ever going to write nonfiction or memoirs again?

FREY: I never wrote nonfiction or memoirs.

FREEMAN: Well, anything that explicitly is about your past?

FREY: I mean, I don’t know. The next book I’ll write is about Timothy McVeigh.

FREEMAN: Really?

FREY: Yeah. But I don’t know what I’ll do after that. I know the next book I’m going to write will be about Timothy McVeigh. But I don’t ever think about nonfiction or fiction or memoirs. That’s shit that publishers make up to sell stuff, you know? Most books aren’t pure nonfiction or fiction. Memoirs are all as full of shit as mine was. I just write books, I just tell stories. I don’t care what people call them. And for the most part, I’m done letting mainstream publishers release them in ways that don’t make me comfortable.

FREEMAN: Why Timothy McVeigh?

FREY: Because it’s a great American story with a lot of room to work in.

FREEMAN: Do you have any personal connection to the bombings?

FREY: None.

FREEMAN: He hasn’t really been explored at all, I guess…

FREY: There are a number of nonfiction books written, American Terrorist, there are a lot of unanswered questions. And I’m not a conspiracy-theory person, but it was a fucked-up situation that was never really explained, and I just think it would be a great story. I think about what Mailer did with The Executioner’s Song, where he told sort of the “great American story” about crime and murder and death and execution.

FREEMAN: Would you classify or consider your upcoming book a “great American story?” It’s sort of a loaded question.

FREY: I’m not going to classify it as anything. I’ll let people read it and decide what they think. I guess like I say, classifications and all that shit, I’ll let other people worry about that. I’m just going to write my books and do my work and release it. Let the world decide what it is, and if it’s any good or not.

Justin Timberlake, Amanda Seyfried, and Olivia Wilde are already starring in Andrew Niccol’s upcoming sci-fi film NOW(which was titled I’m.Mortal until the marketing department stopped laughing and got serious for a second). Now, Deadline reports that the cast’s Hot-o-Meter has just moved from “atomic bomb” to “universe-devouring supernova,” with news that I Am Number Four breakout Alex Pettyfer and White Collar star Matthew Bomer will also be acting in the dystopian drama. (Fox confirmed Pettyfer’s and Bomer’s casting to EW.) Combined with a nifty premise — in the future, people can live forever, but time itself becomes a currency to prevent overpopulation — Now looks like it might be the Andrew Niccol comeback that I (and maybe five other people on earth) have been waiting over a decade for.